Viv is a woman of many sides — smart but easily misled, practical but given to odd ideas, calculating but prone to pitfalls, interested in ideas but a shallow thinker, insecure and vulnerable but determined and hard, capable of strong friendship but also capable of saying, "Loyalty is a means to an end."She and her husband live in a condominium in Western Canada in a place that resembles Edmonton, Alberta. Extremely frustrated by having to live with decisions made by the condo boar...

Includes author-curated discussion questions!Mark Lisac’s Image Decay returns to the pugnacious world of backroom politics laid out in his award-nominated Where the Bodies Lie. Set again in that “unnamed capital city east of the Rockies,” where the Brutalist architecture of the downtown core reflects the body politic laid bare.When a cantankerous ex-government photographer seeks ownership of his prints, the powers-that-be are determined to...

A finalist for the Best First Novel Award at the Arthur Ellis Awards“Sins don’t destroy people here. Dreams do.”Enter the premier’s old friend Harry Asher—lawyer, former hockey star, self-styled intellectual, and recent divorcé—who is hired to dig into the incident. And it isn’t long before Asher’s investigation threatens to expose a chain of corruption that implicates many of the province’s most powerful citizens—including the province’s legendary now-senile ex-premier—as ...

“Sins don’t destroy people here. Dreams do.”In a small city somewhere in an oil-rich Canadian province just east of the Rockies, a political scandal has erupted: an aging cabinet minister has struck and killed a member of his local constituency executive with his half-ton truck, in broad daylight. But the premier suspects that there is more to this “accident” than meets the eye—and he wants to know the real reasons behind it before the media or his political rivals do.Enter...

In 1957, Hamilton is a city steeped in memories of the Second World War and other conflicts. Eighteen-year-old Jack Crandall is becoming obsessed with learning more about his father, a Canadian soldier who abandoned him and his mother, and died in the Dieppe Raid. He finds a kind of father substitute in Walter Haffner, the taciturn German army veteran he works for. But when a Canadian army vet is found beaten into a coma, Jack has to accept that Walter may not have forgotten the war despit...